In The Name Of Our Families by Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella
In their fourth round of dialogue, Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella set themselves the intertwined tasks of exploring the long poetic line and making interventions upon what has always been implicit in their conversations, the meaning of family. The long-breathed line becomes metonym and metaphor for a subject that is evasive, problematic, distressing, comforting, joyous and challenging. Poems acknowledge the life-giving support of the domestic, but also confess that though they may write “in the name of our families… our families will care less for we will always fail them”. There’s the difficult meaning of ancestry: for Kinsella the heroic myths of the settler past, the grandmother “usurping/with her birth cry” the land stolen from Aboriginal people, and knowing that as the family tree spreads, physical trees “fall so fast. Roots and all”. For Dawes there’s the immediate puzzle of the literally contested ownership of his Jamaican ancestral space (and the meaning of all past family spaces), but beyond that ancestry leads through slavery to the broken heritage of Africa. It is also about what one inherits not only from history but from the genes, the knowledge that comes to Dawes in this year of writing, that he has inherited the condition that has brought blindness to other family members. And in their place in the chain, both men ask what will they bequeath as husbands, fathers and writers to the future? Not least there’s the painful reminder of the family’s mortality, the surprise of death that undermines all sense of security. And beyond our own, what do we owe those who are not family, who may need, as Kinsella writes, “every bit of loving going out there.”
Kinsella begins the dialogue by hoping the long line “will take me somewhere beyond the restraints of my past” and certainly both poets discover a deeply rewarding reflectiveness in the conversational expansiveness of voice, and sometimes the long line lends itself to a magnificent prophetic flow that like a mighty river carries all before it. But before the end, Dawes confesses, “John, I am winded from these long-breathed lines”, and in a poem that goes to the very heart of the connections between voice, metre, lineation and meaning, reminds us both that this is a dialogue between writers of real differences of vision, but one that has brought deep mutual and self-understanding.
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